Israel announces daily 'pause' in Gaza
Nicole Johnston: Black parachutes drift through the sky above Gaza and land with crates of food. Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are airdropping aid. Israel has also announced a pause in its fighting for 10 hours a day in three areas, al-Mawassi, Deir al-Bala and Gaza City, to allow aid to be delivered.
Jodie Clark: In the short term it will not make a difference.
Nicole Johnston: Jodie Clark spent 20 years in the Australian military and another 20 in the UN. Until recently she ran the UN's logistics in Gaza.
Jodie Clark: The only way to make a difference is to open all of the borders and saturate the market so that you're taking away the black market, the need for people to buy food. If everybody receives aid then we start to squash the need for people to attack the trucks, the market for the armed gangs to be able to steal the truck. You need at least 500 trucks a day to be feeding two million people.
Nicole Johnston: The ABC has been told that on Sunday 180 trucks were looted by crowds of hungry Palestinians in central Gaza. The aid process has collapsed into chaos. It's been run by a US and Israeli-backed organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation where armed security contractors guard four caged areas. The UN says more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at these sites. Now trucks from Jordan and Egypt are on their way to Gaza's borders. In a statement on X, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said we will be forced to allow the entry of aid.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel has presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza and there is no starvation in Gaza.
Nicole Johnston: More than 100 aid groups disagree. They've warned of mass starvation in the strip. On the ground, Gaza journalist Ghada Kord is relieved there'll be a daily pause in the war.
Ghada Kord: This is a good indicator or a good sign for the people here. And we noticed this morning the military actions. Like there is no drones. Israeli warplanes, they are not flying around us. I hope this will last for more weeks and both Hamas and Israel, they can reach a ceasefire agreement as soon as possible.
Nicole Johnston: But there are no talks underway or signs of a deal. In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on the weekend, in his view, Israel was likely breaching international law by withholding aid from Gaza. The government also says it will not follow France and recognise a state of Palestine. However, former Labor Foreign Minister Bob Carr says stronger action is needed.
Bob Carr: What are we going to do? Wait another month? Witnessing pictures of babies with their rib cages and vertebrae showing.
Nicole Johnston: But the shadow minister for energy and emissions reduction, Dan Tehan, defended Israel's actions, saying it was trying to keep Hamas from taking the aid.
Dan Tehan: Well, Israel has been trying to provide humanitarian relief into Gaza, but has been trying to do it in a way that Hamas does not capitalise on that and use that aid for its purposes.
Nicole Johnston: But Jodie Clark insists unless you've been to Gaza, you can't comprehend the difficulty of delivering aid in a war zone.
Jodie Clark: People that are not in Gaza don't understand the implications. Like an airdrop is a touch in the ocean. It's not doing anything that's impactful, but they're just doing it to take the focus on what the real problem is there. And that's that people are starving.
Andy Park: That's Jodie Clark, a former senior UN logistics coordinator, ending that report by Nicole Johnston.
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